Aaron Dale has never known parenting without co-parenting. He became a parent aged 22 and was not with his son’s mother, so has always parented outside of a relationship. Dale says he “made a lot of mistakes because I was still figuring myself out” and that he didn’t have a blueprint. “I was raised by a single mum. My dad was very inconsistent,” he remembers.
But over the past two decades, through trial, error and therapy, he’s learnt how to be a supportive co-parent as well as a brilliant dad. He now co-parents his two sons, Omari, 19 and Tyler, 13, with their respective mothers, who he has a great relationship with.
Now Dale is a co-parenting advisor and author, helping others navigate the same situation and is about to launch a co-parenting support network for the two million single parents in the UK. His book, The co-parent: a toolkit for parenting together, apart is published on Thursday.
Here are the biggest parenting and co-parenting mistakes he’s learnt over the years.
I thought I’d failed because I wasn’t in a relationship
“I was quite embarrassed about co-parenting in my early days,” Dale says. “I worked in an office for a government organisation where everyone was in a relationship raising children. Some were married. It just wasn’t what I was going through, and I almost didn’t want to tell people I’m not with the mothers of my children.”
But over time, he’s learnt that just because the relationship didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean he’s failed his children in any way. “Your goal is to raise a healthy adult, and set an example of what that looks like. Being a healthy adult is not remaining in an unhealthy relationship,” he says.
“You never stop being a parent; you are now a co-parent as well as a parent. Co-parenting isn’t the goal, being a good parent is. And if we’re both focused on being good parents, ultimately the co-parent relationship works.”
I reacted rather than responded to my co-parent
“There’s a massive difference between reacting and responding,” Dale says. He believes that taking a pause saves a lot of unnecessary stress between co-parents. He’s a strong believer in psychotherapist Dr Jill Bolte Taylor’s 90-second emotion theory. “We have these moments when something’s happened and we get this immediate tension and frustration in our body. There’s an internal flush that lasts about 90 seconds. Where I was going wrong is that in that 90 seconds I would send a text. I felt I needed to say something rather than just allowing myself to calm down and allow the emotion to run through me.”
Dale says we can also extend that 90-second window when we keep repeating that fault or action over and over to ourselves. “We might think: ‘I can’t believe they said that. Who do they think they are?’ So on and so forth. We’re extending what would take 90 seconds to 30 minutes, an hour, a day because we’re repeating our view of what happened,” he explains.
He suggests that co-parents take a minute before they send that text message. “You can be on the phone in the middle of an argument and say, ‘You know what? Let me call you back once we both calm down’. If we’re in a battle to try and win, our child loses.”
I let my childhood negatively affect my parenting
“[At 22] I wasn’t the man I am now,” Dale says. “I had so much trauma I was carrying from my childhood, especially with my dad not being there, that I didn’t realise was weighing me down. And ultimately, that bleeds into how you parent. I recommend therapy to everyone before they become parents.
“I grew up wanting a dad to take me to football. My mum didn’t really have the time. Then I have sons. And what’s the first thing I’m doing? Football. Respectfully to my kids, they had no football talent and they weren’t interested in playing. It just wasn’t them. And through therapy, what I realised is that I was almost parenting my inner child, rather than parenting the child in front of me. I was being the dad that I wanted. I wasn’t being the dad that my children needed.”
I treated maintenance as being negotiable
Dale says some of his biggest regrets are over child maintenance payments. “I tried to use it as a bargaining tool,” he admits. “I saw it almost as a way to control the relationship, believing ‘if I’m giving you this money, then you need to behave a certain way’, when in reality, money is your entitlement. You could shout at me every day, you’re still entitled to that money.
‘I will never get used to that initial feeling when my sons leave. I come back to the house and it’s empty. I look in their room, they’re not there,’ says Dale“Some of my biggest regrets are the moments where, rather than accepting that the relationship is done and I shouldn’t be trying to control this person, I was panicking. I wish I’d just focused on my child. I was allowing my ego to lead me. All of those moments happened in the early years. I’m glad that I’ve been able to learn from it.”
I forced us to do things together (even when it wasn’t best for the child)
I often admire co-parents who enjoy their children’s birthdays together. But Dale reminds me that forced co-parent togetherness can be a lot less fun than genuinely enjoying things separately. “When my son was about four, we decided to go to Chessington for his birthday,” he remembers. “Neither of us wanted to miss out, so we went together. There’s one or two pictures of us from that day. We look so miserable. We didn’t talk, it was such a tense environment, and I remember coming away thinking, ‘I should have just let his mum take him and then I should have taken him’. We can often feel like ‘the other parent’s done that, so I can’t do it now’, but our children have a completely different experience doing something with you than with their other parent. You can still create that moment in a completely different way.”
I didn’t make a parenting plan
“We had a routine in place that worked for us, but I wish we’d had a parenting plan because there was stuff that I would have liked to have been informed of,” he says. “Now I advise anyone starting co-parenting, especially if they’re thinking, ‘we don’t need a parenting plan because everything’s perfect now’, that that is the best time to put together a plan.”
Dale says the plan can be simple: about how to split holidays, Christmas and special events, how to communicate school-related matters, what to do about additional costs etc. He recommends making sure it includes flexibility. “What may be relevant for a five-year-old might not work at 10. And when it comes to the weekend and there’s a family party at the other parent’s house, any refusal to be flexible is a disadvantage to your child. Instead, swap weekends, or rearrange so that your child can win. When my youngest is with me, I look at that as it’s his weekend with me, not my weekend with him. So he is the priority.”
He says without a plan, the risk is that you only decide you need a plan when things are difficult. “But now you’re arguing so no one wants to commit to anything.”
And one he’s still working on… ‘I block out the hardest feelings‘
“I will never get used to that initial feeling when my sons leave. I come back to the house and it’s empty. I look in their room, they’re not there. The hardest it hits me is over Christmas. Last Christmas, we had such an amazing Christmas Eve. It was beautiful. We got pizzas in and had a nice little celebration. We woke up in the morning on Christmas Day, they opened their presents, and all I kept thinking was, ‘They’re going soon’. It was like the clock was going faster and faster.”
Dale is learning how to sit with those uncomfortable feelings. “It’s something I’m working on. I don’t necessarily sit with how I feel, I just try and block things out and get on with it. To do what I need to do,” he says.
‘The Co-Parent: A Toolkit for Parenting Together, Apart’ by co-parenting advisor Aaron Dale – creator of @raisingboys_2men – is available to buy in paperback (£16.99), audiobook and ebook now, published by Bloomsbury
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